Google’s Play Store will boost rankings of high quality apps

With thousands of apps added every day, Google's Play Store is bloated with poor-quality software. We're not just talking about lame game knockoffs -- lots of the worst are badly-coded monstrosities that crash often and drain your battery. To keep them off the top of app lists, Google has overhauled its search and discovery algorithms to take quality into account and downrank bad apples into oblivion.

While these changes should improve the Play Store experience for all, it'll likely take a bit for app creators to understand how Google's weighing quality. In a blog post announcing the change, the search giant recommended developers pay close attention to the Android vitals page and pre-launch reports before pushing out updates. Of course, if you miss any bugs, user reviews will certainly let you know.

We'll see how good a job algorithms do burying bad apps, but at least Google's trying to make getting apps from the Play Store a less painful experience, like it's done with new scanning tools that identify malware-installing "rogue apps."